Van Jones Sees More Political Rebellions on the Horizon

THE LONG SOAK: Is it possible to have strong partisan sympathies and still heal the nation’s political divide? The liberal CNN commentator Van Jones aims to do just that with “Beyond the Messy Truth,” a manifesto that hits the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 13. Jones was asked on public radio’s “On Point” this month what’s happening in the country. “The end times, maybe?” he replied, before criticizing the two-party system as out of touch. “This is what happens when you have a bipartisan elite failure at the top of these political parties. For the past 30 years both political parties have signed off on policies that really hurt tens of millions of Americans.” Voters, he continued, have been “sitting on a white hot stove. And hurt people holler. … You’re seeing a rebellion in this country, and I think more rebellions are to come.”

That said, he urged the electorate to stay involved. “America is hard to do,” he said. “A lot of us forgot that. You know, we got in that Obama bubble bath, and we were just, Oh man, this feels good. Eight years later, you get out and you’re kind of wrinkly and weak and you’re not really prepared to fight. You’ve got to remember, democracy is hard. It’s hard work, and you can’t take any of these elections off.”

SILENCE AND EVASION: “Grant,” Ron Chernow’s biography of the 18th president, enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 2. Chernow won a Pulitzer for his 2010 life of George Washington, but these days he’s probably best known as the author of “Alexander Hamilton” (2004), the basis for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical. So I was curious what Ulysses Grant’s life might look like in freestyle rap. (“When Lincoln was the kingpin / Didn’t care that I liked drinkin’…”) Since Miranda prudently ignored my request for a sample verse, I turned to Chernow instead, who responded, more or less: Please ask me something serious.

Oh, fine. What was it like, I wondered, to write the biography of someone who had already written a great autobiography? As it happened, a friend had asked Chernow the same thing early in the project. “I confess that the question stopped me dead in my tracks,” Chernow said. “But then I realized that my job as a biographer was to probe Grant’s silences and evasions. In the ‘Personal Memoirs’ there wasn’t a word about his struggles with alcohol or his prewar business failures. And Grant omitted any mention of his two-term presidency. So the silences helped to guide the direction of my book and define its agenda. … Sorry I couldn’t rap the response.”